Enceladus

By Kaitlyn O'Connor

It isn't particularly comforting to discover the new home Olric mentioned was the frozen water world, Enceladus--within sight of Saturn--or to find herself living among the Kirean people as the only human.

On top of that, she discovers she's extremely susceptible to the mating kiss of the mermen--and, in the battle over who gets Ella, between Olric and the two Princes of Shendoe, it turns out they all do.

She's deliriously happy about it. Them--not so much ....

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Concepts Publishing
• Release date: Mar 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215512340

Book preview

ENCELADUS

BY

Kaitlyn O’Connor

© copyright by Madris DePasture writing as Kaitlyn O’Connor, December 2022

Cover Art by Eliza Black, December 2022

ISBN 978-1-60394-

Smashwords Edition

New Concepts Publishing

www.newconceptspublishing.com

This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and places are of the author’s imagination and not to be confused with fact. Any resemblance to living persons or events is merely coincidence.

Chapter One

Eleanor ‘Ella’ Fitzhugh looked down at herself, studying the slight mound of her belly with mixed feelings—mostly nerves—edged with fear.

She hadn’t been far from that edge in weeks—not since she was captured by the mermen while trying to perform a survey for an underwater city.

Because her and her team had—unknowingly—breached the border of their realm—the Kirean shifter people of Shendoe.

She was crazy about Olric, the Commander of the Shendoe forces, and he professed the same towards her, but ….

She felt like he’d lied to her—by omission—when he hadn’t at least made the attempt to explain to her that when he said he had to leave he meant the damned planet!

Granted, communicating wasn’t easy or reliable worth a shit.

He couldn’t speak her language or vice versa.

They both hit at it with a handful of words, hand signals, mimes—whatever at least seemed to get the idea across. But she had a strong suspicion that he had deliberately avoided trying to let her know.

She wasn’t certain why she thought that, but she couldn’t dismiss it.

She wasn’t certain of why he might have wanted to, but ….

At the time, she’d thought very little could be more frightening than the situation she’d already found herself in.

She was wrong.

First they shot into space faster than she could form the word and scream ‘no’.

And then not long after they’d left Earth she began to feel ill—just vaguely nauseous at first, but it got worse.

She thought she’d caught something and was, maybe, dying.

Or somebody had slipped poison into her food—since she couldn’t say she was exactly miss popularity around the old city.

It did flicker through her mind that their diet might be getting to her, but as repulsive as she found it, she’d been eating their food long enough she thought any serious consequences of it would have shown up before they left Earth.

It didn’t occur to her that she might be pregnant.

Firstly because she hadn’t really believed her and Olric were compatible that way, but mostly because she was just having way too much fun getting her brains screwed out to consider consequences.

And she’d never been pregnant, so she wasn’t familiar with ‘symptoms’.

And she didn’t have a damned soul to talk to about her ‘problems’.

But the very first time she rolled out of bed and promptly puked, Olric headed to the med center with her.

"Subject is gestating," said the mechanical voice of the med-bot that was examining her.

Not in English, of course—their language.

Olric looked like he was going to pass-out.

And, naturally enough, that sent Ella into a tailspin. Oh my god! Is it contagious? Deadly? Am I dying? Something is growing in there, isn’t it?

Olric got a grip when her fear penetrated his shocked joy. Baby. We mak baby.

Ella gaped at him like she’d never heard the word.

He settled a palm on her belly. Baby here.

Ella felt her brain rotate in her skull dizzyingly.

She collapsed back against the examination table, closing her eyes and willing her stomach to settle when it seemed determined to erupt.

Olric spoke to the med-bot.

A moment later, Ella felt a pinch and then—viola` anxiety all gone—along with consciousness.

Olric apparently decided to play least in sight for a while after she was deposited in their apartment once more with a fairly strict pregnancy regimen of diet and exercise.

Or there was a lot more work for him than Ella would’ve thought.

Granted, he seemed to be in charge of security—still—but the city was very thinly inhabited as far as she could see.

The warriors/soldiers who’d guarded the realm on Earth were, naturally, on the ship headed out—apparently the last ship. There were civilians who hadn’t been evacuated previously.

And apparently, it was an evacuation.

She pieced that together herself, just from little snippets of info she picked up here and there.

Actually, she wasn’t completely certain that Olric was deliberately avoiding her if she was honest. For some strange reason all she wanted to do was to sleep and since she didn’t have a job anymore besides breeder, and no hobbies, and she couldn’t gossip with the ‘ladies’ even if it wasn’t for the fact that she was the main subject, she napped off and on throughout the ‘day’ and ‘night’.

Maybe also because her circadian rhythm was shot to hell because it didn’t match theirs?

The ‘old city’ simulated day and night. When Ella was able to get up without fainting or puking, she wandered around like a sightseer, studying everything—ignoring the stares she got from the aliens.

Because she’d finally concluded they were aliens even though it seemed they’d lived on Earth for several generations. The Old City, she thought, had brought the settlers to Earth and then been ‘parked’ and used as their first city. Or one of the first.

She had no idea why they’d suddenly decided they didn’t like Earth.

Maybe humans were getting too advanced?

Maybe the pollution was starting to get to them?

No clues on that.

She thought it must be something pretty compelling, though, to make them pack up everything and go.

Thankfully, by the time she was well enough to wander around, they’d closed the ‘shutters’, blocking out the endless night of space.

That had really given her the creeps.

She supposed Olric decided it was safe to ‘test’ the waters again when she’d begun wandering around the city.

Or she’d imagined he was avoiding her.

Because he began to spend more time—that she noticed—around her.

Maybe he’d spent just as much time in the apartment before and she hadn’t noticed because she was sleeping a lot.

And maybe not.

But something seemed to have changed between them and she didn’t know what to make of it.

Maybe it wasn’t him at all? Maybe it was just her? Maybe she was seeing things differently now and it wasn’t that anything had actually changed?

Maybe it was because she was pregnant?

It had never occurred to her that she might feel any different being pregnant and that just went to show that ignorance really was bliss. Women planning to add a delightful little bundle to their world weren’t inclined to focus on the negative side of it or they’d never produce.

She couldn’t honestly claim, though, that pregnancy had actually crossed her mind when she was having fun. It wasn’t just not planned. It was … stunning.

She’d found a man that was so amazing, so desirable to her, that there wasn’t a lot of ‘other’ thoughts rambling around in her mind. She was addicted—to pretty much everything about him and when he’d asked her to go with him, she’d gone all mentally deficient and said yes—no questions asked.

Because it also hadn’t crossed her mind when he’d asked her to go with him that he meant somewhere that wasn’t on Earth.

She’d had plenty of time since to consider whether that decision (ha ha!) had been a wise one—even while she was hanging over a toilet bowl.

The vote was still out, in fact, when Olric arrived one morning not long after Earth had dwindled to a dust speck in their wake to drag her from her bed, made her dress, and hustled her to the ship’s main viewing port for a look.

She wasn’t certain how she felt about the view—stunned speechless, shocked, terrified, thrilled, disbelieving—all rolled together.

But there was absolutely no doubt in her mind that the planet that took up most of the screen was Saturn.

She’d seen pictures.

Saturn? she whispered hoarsely. That’s Saturn.

Olric glanced at her and back at the view and then at her in a double take and then, thankfully, caught her before she passed out and hit the floor.

Well, not actually before she passed out—because she didn’t, not completely—but after dizziness washed over her and she began to drift toward the floor like a fluttering feather.

Scooping her up, he rushed to the med center with her, looking distinctly, sickly pale himself.

He proved he didn’t just appear distressed, too. When he’d settled her on a gurney, he passed out, hit the floor before anyone could even attempt to break his fall. And then, as a consequence of that, the medical staff was mostly focused on him until he came around and sat up. Disoriented for a few moments, he roared at them when he realized they’d abandoned her to attend to him. It is my mate who fainted! See to her! Is she losing our child?

That prompted them to shift their attention to Ella, but she’d forgotten all about her faint when Olric did and hit the floor.

They checked her